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techfun89 writes "Viruses can make us all sick, but one day could be engineered to defeat cancer. Cancer cells have one trait that may leave them open to attack. They aren't good at killing off viral infections, hence, at least in theory, you could use a virus to kill cancer cells without affecting the patient. Dr. Ian Mohr, a virologist at New York University, altered the herpes virus so that it isn't attacked by the immune system and kills cancer cells more efficiently. Another virus that is proving effective for liver cancer is Vaccinia. Vaccinia is used to protect against smallpox and so far the results have been promising. Several groups of patients have had an increase in survival times. Meanwhile other viruses are being used for things like melanoma, bladder cancer, and head and neck cancer."

Considering that I have cold sores now, yes. Absolutely. 100% of the time and then some. Herpes, while sucky, is much better than tearing apart parts of your body to hopefully kill a cancer. And that's before all the hormone and self-esteem. Yes, herpes all the way.

Because the first steps towards a smallpox vaccine were based on the realisation that dairy workers who had contracted cowpox were immune to smallpox. Vaccinia is very closely related to cowpox, but has diverged from it slightly since the its widespread use as a vaccine.

Because it was so successful as a vaccine, the name vaccination stuck.

No. This has already been done with HIV, and although the trial was small, the success was remarkable. They use the invasive traits of the virus with none of the nastiness. It's incredibly promising, so much that we may well have a cure (or at least a damned good treatment) for cancer within the next decade.

Two went into complete remission. One saw a major remission, but it was not total. I'd say that's pretty damned promising, especially when one of the cured ones was perhaps a month or two away from the grave.

What would be neat is if the virus mutates and becomes infectious like flu, one day we wake up and cancer is gone.

Though drug companies will make every effort so this is not the case. In fact, if during their research a scientist comes and says we cured cancer with this virus, but its also infectious and has no other side effects, his research will more than likely shut down.

IIRC, the virus has to be targeted at specific structures on the exterior of a specific type of cancer cell, so it is unlikely that anyone who doesn't have cancer could usefully be a carrier. This makes the chances of it spreading among the general population effectively zero.

Turn it around, though. Big Pharma would love to get a cancer vaccine or 30, considering that each tissue type seems to have its own cancer variant. The cure gets loose, they just test for its presence in every blood test, and charge the patient for the vaccine...

Just to shut down this line of reasoning: it requires a large number of genes for a virus to reproduce, which the researchers remove completely to make room for the more useful payload. In the case of the HIV-based study being described, that payload rewired one class of immune cells to identify another class of immune cells (which included the cancerous ones) and destroy them. Viruses crippled in this way can't spontaneously develop the ability to reproduce any more than a human eunuch can. Mutations occur during reproduction, which medically-engineered viruses have no opportunity for doing.

I recall a slashdot story years about about using a virus found in pond scum to attack tumors. The idea was normal cells have dealt with this virus many times over, but the cancer cells forget what to do with it.They had a before and after picture of a golfball sized tumor on the back of someone's neck that was almost completely gone after one injection of this stuff.

Always wondered what happened to that research, I figured some big drug company silenced it.

All cells have many features that passively block viruses by messing them up. (Sorry, "virii" isn't a word.) A lot of mechanisms for gene regulation work by chopping up transcripts and proteins that are recognized by the cell as having broken down due to heavy use. This conveniently encumbers viral payload delivery, but is usually dysfunctional in cancer.

Nah. Biologists are sticklers about preserving dying Latin forms (hence treating "data" as a plural when the rest of the world has moved it to singular) and because "virus" was uncountable and had no plural in Latin, they're pretty opposed to formulating a Latin plural that was never attested historically. My girlfriend, who moved from studying Classics to Biochemistry, often remarked that many of the newer coinages were fantastically vapid—the whole mitotic cycle is made up of things like 'long phase

Nonono. Zombie-attacking rattlesnakes, which are eaten by radioactive mongooses, which are hunted by the carnivorous gorrillas which freeze to death when winter comes. Except in Florida. Oh, and where void by law...

But with enough money and treatments you can stave off the advancement of HIV indefinitely ([magic johnson])... Whilst not cured... his HIV is at the "undetectable" levels... 20 years after he announced he had it... I know of so many cases where cancer, after being treated, goes into remission, and comes back with a vengeance. ([andy whitfield - r.i.p])

Human communication is predicated on the basis of making assumptions about what others are thinking. There was no other way to respond to your initial comment than to either ask for further clarification of what exactly was going on in your mind, or to make an assumption about what you were saying. The literal statement was "Isn't this old news? I thought HIV was the cure for cancer," which is most closely translated into the question "why are other viruses involved?" because you explic

So you've eliminated all forms of mutation? Doubtful since the sun is still on. I'm sure they've done everything possible to eliminate it's replication ability to "self replicate". However viruses have been shown to swap genes with other viruses and bacteria. It would be a bit arrogant to believe that a random event wont occure and cause the gene that allows it to slip by the immune system won't get picked up by other more liberal viruses or bacteria, or for it to get changed in some other fashion. Sayi

I realise what you're saying sounds plausible to you, but it's actually dependent on a whole swath of technical underpinnings that aren't applicable in this situation. There are cases in which co-infection by a normal virus could cause the engineered virus to be produced, but they have limitations. Let's go on a tour.

When UV and other forms of ambient radiation cause mutations in DNA, there is a very limited amount of damage they can do. Typically this consists of damaging a single nucleotide, or causing it

It is not possible for a provirus to spontaneously re-develop all of the necessary machinery for making a complete package. That's equivalent to making a typo in Word and accidentally producing a Shakespearean sonnet. It's a lot of very specific programming, not random noise.

Viruses evolved those mechanisms once before and there is no reason to believe that they wouldn't be able to do so again. Lets say one mutation occurs that makes the virus just linger in the system longer increasing the changes that the patient gets infected with the original virus. That increases the number of copies, and because this version isn't attacked by the immune system lingers around again until the patient is infected again. Given enough time and enough random mutations it could become a threa

Dr. Bell at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, http://www.ohri.ca/profiles/bell.asp [www.ohri.ca]. He's been researching and using viruses to treat cancer in liver cancer. I believe it is currently in clinical trials in Europe and showing promise to not just kill cancer cells but cut off blood flow to the tumour which also helps to 'starve it'.

Yeah those stupid researchers with their fancy MDs and PhDs in virology, immunology, pharmacology, genetics, molecular biology, and decades of hands-on experience are completely ignorant of the subject. We must defer to a random group of Hollywood screen writers that just happened to land a gig adapting a decent 1950's science fiction novel into a shitty movie.

Hollywood screen writers just happened to land a gig adapting a decent 1950's science fiction novel into a shitty movie.

No joke.

SPOILER

In the movie, Will Smith becomes legendary by sacrificing himself and providing a cure.
In the book, the protagonist spends his daylight hours staking vampires while they sleep or dragging their comatose bodies into the sun, and eventually discovers that he's the last human and that vampires have made a new civilization after getting a handle on their infection (feeding on animal blood?). He's become the legendary monster that kills innocents while they sleep in the safety of their homes

Yeah those stupid researchers with their fancy MDs and PhDs in virology, immunology, pharmacology, genetics, molecular biology, and decades of hands-on experience are completely ignorant of the subject. We must defer to a random group of Hollywood screen writers that just happened to land a gig adapting a decent 1950's science fiction novel into a shitty movie.

Though the sample size is much smaller, the success rate is much higher. The theory here is different though: the HIV virus infects only T-Cells. T-Cells are responsible for "marking" bodily intrusions as harmful -- but rather than the traditional AIDs payload of "don't attack anything" going into them you alter the HIV virus's DNA to train the T-Cells to kill cancers. So in essence, it teaches your body how to treat cancer as an infection.

The choice of virus is mostly about picking what tissue you want to engineer. In the case of the technique you cited, the researchers made T cells (the immune system's hitmen, if you will) target another class of immune cells called B cells (they're the ones that make antibodies.) The engineering work was specific to the one type of B cell that had gone cancerous (although there were innocent casualties within that type.) HIV-based engineering wouldn't be practical if you were trying to fix cancer in a tiss

I've got a friend with brain cancer who was enrolled in one of the current virus trials - one which has shown great promise in animal studies. He ended up leaving the trial after a month or so, with tumor regrowth and tremendous swelling around the tumor site, causing all sorts of problems with speech, reading, and sight. He has surgery scheduled for tomorrow, after that, hopefully another trial.

Not to be a downbuzz, but it's a long road before this kind of therapy is anything more than an experimental crapshoot.

It may be too late, but you could tell your friend about vitamin D, iodine, and vegetables, fruits, and beans, as well as fasting, in preventing and sometimes curing cancer. I've posted many links on that stuff here in the past. Just google on those term and cancer, and look up Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work and Dr. John Cannell's work. Unfortunately, the best way to deal with cancer is to prevent it by helping the human immune system deal with individual cancer cells before they proliferate. Once you have cancer,

Ahhh, yes, special diets and fasting to treat cancer. Worked GREAT for Steve Jobs, didn't it?

First off, good diets are the "FSKING DUH" of cancer preventions (and CV, and diabetes, etc...), but that's MAINLY with GI cancers or urinary tract cancers. Skin, brain, bone, blood? Mostly genes, with a just enough of a hint of environmental exposure to terrify you if you think about it too much.

And as for your suggestions:Vitamin D's probably not gonna be the wonder drug everyone's been hoping for. The data on

AC, probably you feel you have the moral high ground here and so that justifies incivility and so on, but you are mainly just regurgitating outdated conventional wisdom, sorry. Saying only genes cause cancer is just deep ignorance, sorry. Genes may give people weak links, but whether those weak links are ever pulled on to the point where they break is in most cases determined by what you eat and how you live (a point Dr. Fuhrman makes in "Eat to Live"). You're just advocating a certain kind of genetic fatal

The problem with using living solutions to medical problems (as opposed to drugs) is the high rate of mutation. Perhaps you engineered the virus to kill the cancer cells, but 2 months and 40k generations later it could be doing something completely different.

All viruses used in this manner are wired not to reproduce. It means you need to inject a lot more copies of the virus, but there's no chance of mutation in a virus that can't reproduce. And no, they can't spontaneously redevelop the huge number of genes necessary to reproduce; they don't even have the opportunity to do so. It's completely safe. They're just DNA injectors, and we're exploiting the side-effects that the viruses normally bundle with their (deleted) reproductive payloads. In this case, healthy cells are smart enough to fend off the infection, but cancer cells aren't, which is why they're cancerous in the first place.

Well let's agree that the article is really light on information, but assuming you are able to remove enough of the viral DNA to prevent reproduction, how are you going to produce the billions of them required for treatment? You can't make them individually, so they have to be capable of reproduction to be useful.

However, I think they are using the word "engineered" too liberally. They basically just want to inject a particular viral strain which happens to kill a higher percentage of cancerous cells than n

Here's [nap.edu] a textbook on viral engineering; it's paywalled if that sort of thing bothers you, but the details can be found in there. You're certainly right that the methods involved are broadly messy, start with reproduction-competent vectors, and that some bits of the machinery get left behind, but like the cancer itself, the lack of the ability to reproduce prevents them from being able to exploit evolutionary mechanisms to support their survival. I guess the virus might be able to reproduce if the patient ha

start with reproduction-competent vectors, and that some bits of the machinery get left behind.

So they would splice an engineered gene into the genome which somehow shortens the viral DNA with each generation. So the viruses get busy infecting cells in the lab, and after some point, the cells begin bursting with a bunch of viral pieces instead of whole functional viruses. After enough time, all the functional viruses have been used up, and all you have left is viral fragments. What are you going to use to attack the cancer cells?

I expect we'll even see synthetic virus printers some day.

Yes, but at that point you just manufacture virus sized machines which d

However, since writing that I realised that such a treatment could have its reproductive machinery rescued if it co-infects with the natural form of the virus. If the people who were treated with the HIV-based method from the other story actually had AIDS, then anyone infected with HIV from them would also get the modified virus, and hence the B-cell-killing T-cells that made that treatment work.

unless you are a Big Pharma who wants to make $ out of the treatment.
The reovirus and about 10 other viruses already attack cancer cells in this way. There have been clinical trails, somewhere in Canada, I believe.
If you catch reovirus naturally, you will perhaps feel under the weather for a week or so. On the other hand, the clinical trials that inject reovirus into the tumor have a high rate of complete remission of the cancer.
So rethink the usefulness of the FDA : it makes it impossible for 'natu

This was discovered by a doctor, William Coley [wikipedia.org] in the 19th century, and used effectively by him to treat a number of cancers. It has been called Coley fluid or Coley Toxins. [wikipedia.org]

Research has shown that that disease was endemic to corporate raiders. As corporate raiding is no longer generally practised (except by large tech conglomerates) the last known sufferer died in 1991. His last words were "My only regret is that I haven't been cryogenically frozen."